Designing Funny Greeting Cards

When you get your custom greeting cards done, you can design it any variety of ways. You can choose to outfit it with photos, original art or just lace it with your own brand of humor.

Humorous greeting cards are popular for a reason - they're extremely memorable, apart from providing that gift of laughter. If you feel that a funny greeting card will work best for the people you're planning to send them to and the occasion they're celebrating, here's a brief guide on how to write with humorous sentiments.

First, the things to avoid. While toilet humor can be funny at the right time, greeting cards aren't their venue. Avoid racist, sexist and similarly offensive jokes, regardless of how funny they may seem.

Second, there are a few basic techniques good greeting card writers employ when crafting those funny lines. Most humorous greeting cards employ one or a combination of these techniques.

Bait & Switch. With this technique, the card starts out simple enough with the typical greetings on the cover. Inside the fold, however, you deliver a strong punch line.

Examples

BAIT: Happy 25th Birthday
SWITCH: I'm sorry, this card was printed several decades ago.

BAIT: Happy Graduation
SWITCH: Now get a job and pay me back for all that money I loaned you.

Gentle Insults. You can just call them "insults" but I wanted to highlight the word gentle. You want the receiving party to laugh, after all, not cry in shame. This one should be a little more forthright in its intentions - looking at the cover alone, you know there must be a punch line inside. Sometimes, there doesn't even need to be anything inside as the whole humorous sentiment is written on the outer fold.

Examples

COVER : A Good Case Can Be Made For Enjoying Christmas
INSIDE : In Fact, You'll Probably Have Two Cases You Fat Alcoholic. Merry Christmas!


Visual Gags. Usually a variation of either the bait and switch or gentle insults, visual gags add pictures to drive the humor in. It's the most popular variation of funny greeting cards as its the type you usually see across racks.

Examples

PICTURE: Two Old Men In A Calgary Club
CAPTION: Your Male Strippers Are Here
INSIDE: Happy Birthday!

Greeting Cards For Your Employees

Celebrating special days for your company's employees can go a long way towards raising their morale, apart from making office life feel more personable. Even a small token to recognize events like birthdays and special holidays like Christmas can go a long way.

Most people associate work with things they'd rather not do. As a result, the office is usually among the last of the places they'd rather be in. While greeting cards won't change the fact that people would rather frolic in the beach than take phone calls and work on spreadsheets, it's a great way to make those tiny cubicles feel like a more welcoming space.

A big office I used to work for in Toronto would have cards printed especially for employees. During birthdays and major holidays, each one gets a card along with a short note from one of the VP's. If you're celebrating a birthday, you got a cake along with the card. Come Christmas time, the cards came with a small gift. It wasn't much and it probably isn't that sincere - still, it made the office a place where we can feel at home instead of just four walls with tables and a boatload of work in front of us.

Giving your employees greeting cards for those special times is one of the cheapest ways to reach out and show a personal interest in their lives, well beyond the objectifying performance numbers and attendance records. Why not have a batch printed and put a smile across your employees' face for even just a day?

A Few Guidelines To Sending Business Greeting Cards

When you're sending out business greeting cards, it's important to bear in mind that it's still tied to your professionial reputation. It's a marketing tool as much as it is a way of showing gratitude for your customers' continued support. As such, following some guidelines will help ensure that your good intentions are rewarded and your customers appreciate the small gesture.

Keep Your Contact List Updated

Make sure to keep your contact list current. You don't want to keep sending a client "Happy Anniversary" cards after they've been divorced and the best way to ensure it doesn't happen is to take the effort to consistently update your list every time you learn of life changes.

Use A Theme Suited For Your Business

Make sure the color, design and sentiments expressed in the greeting cards you send reflect your business. You never want to come across in an improper manner, unless your line of business calls for doing so.

Personalize It

You can add family or employee photos or simply add a sincere note every time you send one out. People likely receive dozens of holiday and greeting cards during special occasions and it can feel like a chore having to read them all. Without a personal note, yours will likely be forgotten right after they open the next one.

Mail It To Their Home

If you have a personal relationship with the contact, mail it to their Toronto or Calgary home, even if business is your primary reason of interaction. When you do, include their family in the greetings, even mentioning the name of their spouse and kids if you know it. This makes any message more personal and intimate.

Send It In Time

During big holidays like Christmas, printing companies are usually heavily booked and the mail rush can get your greeting cards delayed. Always order your cards and send them early to be one of the first to bid them good greetings during the season.

When To Send Your Customers Greeting Cards

Do you send your customers holiday cards? If not, you might want to start. It's a low-cost, low-maintenance way to keep in touch and build real relationships with your clients beyond the monthly invoices and weekly consultations.

Of course, with dozens of holidays every year, you want to pick the few times that are appropriate to send them a card. Here's a few you may want to consider.

Christmas

It's the ideal season to send your all your best customers a holiday card. Christmas is just that one holiday out of the year when everybody bids everyone else good tidings and the most appropriate time to let your clients know that you appreciate their business.

Father's Day

If your business is related in even a remote way to fatherhood (cigars, cars and similar products), Father's Day is a good time to send your favorite dads a token of appreciation for their continued support.

Mother's Day

Like Father's Day, if your business is related to this special day for moms, sending out a holiday card is wholly appropriate, apart from being a good way to invite them back and do business with you again. This is especially important when your business involves anything that has to do with children - sucking up to the mother always proves to be a good bet.

Valentine's Day

While it may feel out of place, Valentine's Day is actually a good time for may kinds of businesses to get in their customer's radar once again. Everyone appreciates a romantic card that bids them the best gifts of the heart for the season. I've seen hotels, travel agencies and restaurants send out romantic holiday cards in time for Valentine's and it always came across as a sweet gesture.

For Your Customers This Christmas: A Card Or A Gift?

During Christmas and similar holidays, reaching out to your customers as a way to show appreciation for their business can be one of your most important marketing tools. As such, manufacturers of novelty gift items and holiday cards usually see a lot of business.

Remembering your customers during the holidays can make your professional relationship feel more than just a financial arrangement. The simple act of giving them something to remember you by can make future interactions feel less formal and more personal. At the end of the day, isn't that the kind of relationship you'd rather cultivate with the people you do business with?

Some people prefer the intimacy a holiday card can bring. Even a simply-designed greeting card with some genuine, handwritten sentiments can feel like an honest effort to show gratitude.

Others opt instead for gifts. Small presents like gift bags are a great way to say thanks. Giving out office supplies branded with your company's logo allow you to both give something that is useful while keeping your brand in people's consciousness.

Whichever you choose to send out, holiday cards or gifts, the most important thing is to do it as a way to give, instead of a way to take. If you're sending out Christmas cards, for instance, with a sales pitch at the inside fold, it's both tacky and insincere - might as well send them a flyer and a brochure while you're at it.

What kinds of holiday greetings will your Toronto clientele appreciate? What kinds of gifts will be valuable to your customers in Calgary? Answer those questions and keep them in mind when deciding what to give your loyal clients this Christmas.

Sending Christmas Cards With Personal Photos

Christmas is around the corner and, for many of us, it's possibly the merriest time of the year. If you're like most folks, you probably purchase and give out your share of greeting cards to family, friends and various acquaintances.

While sending cards that we get off-the-shelf from local bookstores isn't so bad, it can make a simple greeting extremely special when you personalize it beyond a simple handwritten pleasantry. An easy way to add a personal touch to your holiday greetings is by sending cards adorned with personal photographs.

If you're sending the Christmas cards to relatives and friends, you can choose a recent photo of your family as the central design. More than sending good tidings their way, the card becomes a way to clue them in on how your family is doing and the way your kids have grown, making it a keepsake more than a simple Hallmark Greetings card could ever be.

For your business, Christmas photo cards can work even as a way of sending holiday greetings to clients and associates. In place of a family portrait, you can opt for photos of your employees. It's a great personal touch - I myself received a couple of them last Christmas and was pleasantly touched. I deal with maybe, two or three people regularly from those companies and it was nice to put a face to the other employees I've never had the pleasure of meeting.

25 Hour Printing can help you design your holiday photo card so make sure to inquire if you're interested in buying a set for the coming season. A picture paints a thousand words and a Christmas photo card will easily do the same for your holiday greetings.

Using Greeting Cards To Introduce Your Business

Introducing your new business can be tricky. As such, executing that first marketing push can go a long way towards setting your new venture up for a successful start.

Many small businesses get their foot into customers' doors by offering something new - a notable price point, a unique product or a deal that is so sweet it's impossible to forego. Often, these initial offers come at a loss for the company, a trade-off to get new customers to try you out. Even with such offers in place, you still need to find a way to let potential customers know about your new business. Sending out a marketing package to a mailing list or buying local advertising space is usually the first way to get your word out.

Instead of sending out brochures and postcards to potential customers when getting in touch via mail to invite them to the opening, some people use greeting cards. If your opening happens to coincide with a holiday, it's a marketing strategy that can work really well.

Christmas, for instance, is a holiday that sees plenty of people hitting local shops for gifts. If you're opening a new toy store in Toronto a couple of weeks before the date, you can send out greeting cards to your target mailing list a week before. The cards, of course, will wish them holiday greetings and invite them to take advantage of your special opening prices.

It definitely comes across more personal than a standard brochure or sales letter, apart from being more fitting to the upcoming season. If you have coupons you want them to use, you can slip it inside the card and call it a special gift especially for them.

Promote Local Businesses Using Door Hangers

While the large shopping malls and online superstores have given mom-and-pop stores a harder time, many communities still thrive with continued patronage of local businesses. This is as true in the heart of Toronto as it is in many urban areas the world over.

Sure, it's a much harder landscape for them now. With a little work and genuine cooperation, however, many smaller, community based businesses are successfully using low-cost print advertising to keep their shops alive.

One trend that's starting to pick up is shared promotion - various small businesses coming together under a single theme to help market one another's services.

Support Your Local Businesses

One campaign I saw used door hangers designed with a central theme of supporting local stores to help keep the community strong. Using slogans like "Doing Business With Your Neighbors" and "We're Not Just Stores, We're Your Friends", these door hangers invoke a sense of community and uses it to entice people to do business with local merchants.

The door hangers, of course, include logos and text of the participating local businesses on the other side. It's a great way to appeal to people's emotions and ideals - while making them aware of your business operation in the area.

Cheap And Effective

This is one of the cheapest yet most effective uses of print advertising available to everyone. How can people deny that supporting local business owners will help keep their community strong and vital? After all, some of these local merchants are likely their own friends, family and colleague. Such a powerful message delivered for just a few hundred dollars per one thousand door hangers - and costs shared equally among your peers.

Marketing To Foreign-Speaking Customers? Take Advantage Of Double-Sided Business Cards

Business cards are the easiest way for present and potential clients to remember about you. Wallet-sized and handy, they bear your basic business and contact information as well as, perhaps, a short call to action. It makes sense to always keep it simple and easy to read - after all, the last thing you want for a business card to do is confuse your customers or have them strain to make out your contact number.

If you're marketing to two sets of customers who speak in different tongues, why not cater to both their needs and print up your business cards dual-sided with one language on each side? In a bilingual country such as Canada, after all, it makes sense to have business cards with your contact details in English on one side and in French on the other. This should prove especially useful when you're dealing with potential clients equally in both English-speaking areas like Toronto and predominantly French provinces such as Quebec.

In the US, this makes a lot of sense too with the rise of Spanish-speaking populations in many urban areas. Should your area of business be home to plenty of naturalized Hispanics, reaching out to accommodate their needs will only do your business good. Why restrict your promotional material's demographic, after all, when you can have it both ways?

For companies that deal with clients in foreign countries, in particular, multi-lingual dual business cards should prove a great tool. Why burden your Korean contacts with Romanized letters and numbers when you can easily have the other side of the business card printed in Korean characters?

Put your clients' best interests in mind and print your business card to help them contact you better.

Why Choose Folded Business Cards?

The first time I received a folded business card, I was intrigued. It fit just as handily into my wallet yet definitely made much more of an impact. Actually, I kept it in my shirt pocket the first time I got one. I wanted to open it later and read what was inside.

Like a cross between a tent card, a business card and a brochure, folded business cards allow you to distribute the same contact information while allowing ample space to effectively convey your message. For instance, you can easily fit a photo, product description or a short sales message in the inner panels while leaving the outer ones for typical business information.

You can opt to make it a tear-down card, with one side serving as the typical business card and the other side a coupon your customers can use. After all, if they're getting your contact information, chances are they'll be doing business with you soon. What better way to remind them of a possible deal than a coupon right next to your business details?

There are tens of other things you can do with a folded business card, depending on what business you're in. If you own a restaurant in Toronto, for instance, you can use it to:

• Draw a detailed map of your location
• List a menu of your house specialties
• Show the recipe for one of your popular dishes
• Add mouth-watering pictures of your restaurant's fare

A multitude of promotional options open up when you decide to use a folded business card in place of conventional ones. Why not have your next batch of cards printed that way?

Above photo by: Andrew Turner

Using A Theme For Event Promotions

When coming up with design ideas for your printed promotional materials for an event, always work for consistency and a single message to maximize your impact.

A theme helps tie the event together, whether you're organizing a concert, a dance event or an art display. It goes without saying though that you should come up with the design for each item at the same time - whether you're looking to promote with postcards, flyers or posters. Otherwise, the layouts might end up disjointed. While the loose theme might not do serious damage to the actual event, it can dampen people's overall enjoyment of it.
More Than Information

Most promotional materials are designed to impart information - names, locations and dates. Worse than being simply typical, they're downright boring. Having an integrated theme worked into your promotion ensures an attractive packaging to your marketing approach.

For instance, say you're organizing the promotion for a heavy metal band that's coming through Calgary. While sorting out ideas for possible themes, you decide to use the cover of their latest album as inspiration. Imagine having flyers, posters and concert tickets that use the same graphics and layout. It can make for a truly powerful theme that should help reinforce fans' desire for the event and, consequently, increase their enjoyment of it.

The theme of your promotion can also give people an idea of what to expect from an event, heightening their anticipation and allowing them to be better ready when attending it. A retro-themed flyer to a dance party pretty much lets people know what kind of music will be playing and how they can dress for the occasion. A dirty cut-and-paste lettered punk rock styling on your flier should do the same.

Flyers and other printed promotional items can truly help make a good event even more special. Don't settle for a generic stock image with the time and place - be excited about your promotion and your audience will likely be as enthused about it as you.

5 Ways You Can Use A Custom Postcard For Your Business

There are many ways you can take advantage of a custom postcards for use in your business. Here's five of them:

Invitations

Send potential clients a well-designed postcard inviting them to a special event in your restaurant or a product launch in your store. It's cheaper than a fancy invitation and should work just as well. If you're showing off an art or a product collection, you can use the actual product itself as the main graphic on the card.

Launching A New Shop

If you're opening a new store in downtown Toronto, you can send postcards to local residents via mail informing them of the upcoming launch. Marketing through postcards can prove a colorful way to introduce your new business while reaching out to people on a personal level.

Reminders

You can use postcards to drum up repeat business by sending them to former customers. Whether they have forgotten about you or just haven't come around to needing your services again, a timely postcard in the mail should help keep you fresh in their mind.

Exclusivity

Regular customers who bring in a hefty chunk of your business can definitely appreciate receiving a custom postcard in the mail to show your appreciation. Even better, you can send them postcards to announce exclusive sales and private promotions reserved for only your best clients.

Upselling

Less invasive than a phone call, you can use a postcard to upsell customers a few weeks after you've closed a sale. You can use it as a thank-you note along with an offer to contact you if they need any assistance. Additionally, you can mention a discounted sale for a related product or service that they may find of value.

Color Guide To Your Printed Advertising Materials

When deciding on a design for your business cards, brochures and similar printed materials, color is undoubtedly one of the main considerations you need to take up with your commercial printer. After all, colors can convey messages all on their own, apart from making your printed advertising more palatable to the eyes.

A poor choice in colors can render your material boring or just plain unreadable. A good choice, on the other hand, will immediately attract attention and prod potential customers to take notice. Colors can elicit certain emotions in people. Take note of color use in your promotional materials - after all, it can mean triggering the right combination of feelings to finally push that sale.

What do specific colors tend to do?

• Blue is one of the safest colors you can use for your business materials. Lighter shades of it can invoke feelings of tranquility and peace while darker shades often trigger images of reliability and confidence.
• Black is a serious color and paints an immediate picture of authority. Done well, it can bring up feelings of elegance, sophistication and class.
• White keeps things simple. Used throughout your printed materials, it can be used to communicate purity, innocence and a clarity of intentions.
• Green is a lively color that is often associated with nature. It can invoke images of life, vitality and good health. With the current trend of eco-awareness, green can also associate your business with an environmentally-friendly disposition.
• Red is the color of passion and is perfect for campaigns looking to invoke sensuality, excitement and other extreme emotions.
• Yellow is a lively that, much like orange, can manage to stand out from a crowd with little else involved. It symbolizes feelings of joy, warmth and hope.
• Orange is all about fun. Great for creative campaigns, it brings up images of enthusiasm and a dynamic vibe. It's also attention-grabbing - great for promotional materials that can stand out from the crowd.
• Purple is often used when targeting younger consumers. Children, for one reason or another, gravitate towards purple shades more than any other color. Employed for a more adult audience, though, they can be used to convey ideas of royalty and nobility.

Five Ways To Improve Your Postcard Marketing

As good as we think we've designed our marketing campaigns, it pays to step back occasionally and try to look at it with fresh eyes. Is there really nothing else you can do to make it even better?

You can use these five things as possible guides when working on your custom business postcards for better results.
1. Is it attractive?

Simply put, an attractive postcard gets kept and saved for later. An ugly one gets picked up with the mail and thrown away with the rest of the junk. Even if the person who received the postcard is not interested in your service, they are still likely to keep the postcard if its beautifully done, even just for the sake novelty.

Many people have a natural instinct to hold on to nice-looking things even when they don't need them. As a result, your postcard will likely survive long enough to be read by other people, some of whom may actually turn out to be potential clients.

2. Does it read like a message from a friend?

The more personable and intimate it feels, the better results your postcard marketing is likely to get. People are starting to numb from the multitude of advertising around us - you'll need to tug at their hearts if you're going to sway them your way.

3. Does it express the benefits of your service clearly?

Your postcard should clearly express the benefits of your product or service in the first few seconds of reading it otherwise, you run the risk of losing the customer early in the process.

4. Does it offer a way for interested customers to respond quickly?

Will they need to drive down the mall to get the deal or can they just call in with their special discount code and place an order? If an interested customer reads your postcard, you'll need to offer them a way to take immediate advantage. A hot prospect, after all, can only stay warm for so long.

5. Can it convey the same message with less words?

If you can express the same ideas with the same clarity in shorter copy, why not trim it down further? Your postcard will be easier to read and faster to process that way. Additionally, you won't run the risk of losing your reader with so many words.

5 Reasons To Choose Flyers Over Classified Ads

Some local businesses prefer to advertise in the classified sections of newspapers and print magazines to announce special promotions and brand new offerings. We think you'll be best served by opting for flyer marketing instead. Here are five reasons why.

1. Flyers Are Way Cheaper Than Classified Ads

In Toronto and Calgary, a small newspaper ad the size of a business card is likely to cost you several thousand dollars, especially when you're targeting publications with large print runs. In contrast, you can use a fraction of that money to print tens of thousands of flyers and have them distributed across your target market. From a cost and reach standpoint, flyers simply outperform newspaper ads, hands down.

2. Better Design Options

Flyers can give you better design options than what most publications will allow. You can choose to have your flyers decked in attractive color, odd shapes and unusual designs - things newspapers and magazines will likely have plenty of limitations on. Same with your font use, graphics and preferred design elements.

3. More Flexible Medium

With flyers, you can choose what kind of materials you want your advertising to run on - glossy sheets, bright-colored papers, pretty much anything you can find available. You can choose a run using more expensive materials to send out to your mailing list while opting for cheaper prints of the flyers you're handing out on the street. There's a wide divide you can traverse - a flexibility you won't enjoy with classified listings.

4. Handpick Your Customers

You can choose who will receive your flyers based on your own research of your target market - after all, who knows your customers better than you?

5. Say Everything You Want To Say

With flyer marketing, you won't be tied down to a limited length of copy. With a large helping of space available, you can say your piece without having to mince words. As a result, you can better explain what you're offering without having to leave anything between the lines.

Marketing Your Art With Postcards

If you're an artist - whether your medium is photography, painting or sculpture - postcards can prove a good marketing tool to get samples of your work out to potential clients and patrons. Postcards are definitely cheaper than other forms of marketing. It's also highly personal - ideal for promoting intimate items such as works of art.

How would you go about it?

1. Highlight Your Best Work

Pick representative pieces of your work. Choose the specific photographs or paintings that you feel will make the best impression on those you're marketing to. Use these chosen items as the main image in each postcard.

If you're a painter or sculptor, it might pay dividends to have a professional photographer come in to take a flattering photo of the art pieces. After all, even the most profound works of art may end up less than stunning when captured by an untrained lens.

2. Use Plenty Of Text

Like other forms of selling, marketing your work to art dealers and collectors will require you to pitch for a sale. While it's nice to think that your best pieces can sell themselves, most contemporary artists who manage to make a living out of their art know the importance of selling their work.

Use the small space in the front of the postcard and the wide area of the back panel to create a persuasive copy for your case.

3. Make It Personal

Postcards are an intimate medium. Use conversational language and informal tones when crafting your message. Direct mail is loaded with junk messages - separate yourself from the herd.

4. Let Them Know Your Accomplishments

When you're an unknown artist trying to make a dent in a seemingly unwelcoming space, it pays to list as many testimonies to your brilliance as you can. Choose your most prominent awards and most notable accomplishments along with a testimonial from a well-known artist, if you can manage one, to solidify your position.

Using Humor In Your Postcards And Brochures

Laughter, despite everything said to the contrary, is still the best medicine. This is why humor works so well in print marketing campaigns - both in regular advertising and direct mail formats. Intelligent, well-crafted humor, after all, is an art form. Using it well can paint your business in a sophisticated and insightful light.

Direct response marketing material, for one, is laden with boring, typical and uninspired work. Taking a step away from the same old offerings to deliver a laugh with your own promotional campaigns will easily let you stand out from the crowd.

What kind of humor typically works well for postcards and brochures?

1. Unlikely Contrasts

Promotional tools that contrast two conflicting concepts can make for a well-done humorous campaign. For instance, the picture of a completely decked-out goth rocker cross-stitching a butterfly pattern can make for a humorous contrast, possibly enough to convince people to try out your cross-stitch supplies store.

2. Self-Deprecating Humor

While most businesses will try to convince customers they're the best people for the job, you can set your advertising apart by pointing out a product's flaws instead. For instance, when promoting your vegan restaurant in Calgary with a flyer, you can feature made-up degrading statements from non-vegetarians who think your food is not fit for human consumption. With thousands of vegan jokes currently circulating, you shouldn't run out of one-liners to include.

3. Self-Aggrandizing Humor

Taking the opposite road from the second type of humor, self-aggrandizing humor makes downright fantastic claims. Borrowing largely from exaggerations many businesses use to advertise themselves, self-aggrandizing promotional campaigns take it a step further into a full-blown parody. The thousands of Chuck Norris one-liners strewn all over hip shirts and internet forums probably demonstrate this type of humor best!